


three long days

by owlvsdove



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Brainwashing, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 06:10:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2457731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlvsdove/pseuds/owlvsdove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma returns to SHIELD. And it goes downhill from there. </p>
<p>[Spoilers for 2.03]</p>
            </blockquote>





	three long days

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm going to keep writing the same dumb "Jemma returns" fics until, you know, Jemma returns. This one features references to brainwashing, because I am an asshole.

 

They don’t have a room soundproof enough to contain her screaming.

This is surprising. Jemma’s usually a soft touch, gentle and patient and settled. But now she is screaming, and they all can hear it.

It goes on for three days.

It starts with something breaking.

It starts with her being cornered in a storage room, guns drawn, when she has a brief moment of clarity, when the brilliance of her mind fights against the steel-trap that’s been clamped over it, when she punches a hole through it. One brief moment when they all realize.

She is not herself.

She screams.

Their guns lower, slowly. Coulson lunges to catch her as she drops to her knees but May cuts him off, faster and more desperate. Skye is already crying, all her training fleeing through the open door.

Jemma is not crying. Crying isn’t an adequate term. She is a collapsing star, she is an explosion unending. She screams and screams and screams. May pressing her face into her shoulder won’t drown it out. Nothing will.

May cuts out a dark, serrated look. “Clear the room.” It is more growl than speech. Coulson realizes too late what is happening here. He always realizes too late. But May has seen this before. May has woken up screaming, grasping, begging for reprieve. There are no natural breaks in this pain. It will persist.

They clear the room. A storage closet with a single-bulbed light.

Fitz hears the screams from the lab, and Mack tries to stop him. But he hadn’t even known they’d brought Jemma back yet. The sound reminds him of something: the last moment before he died. Even though the sound is somewhat unfamiliar, he knows it’s her. He stops dead in the doorway. He can’t see her face, just her shuddering form, crashed on the floor. May is wrapped around her, and he is burdened with the look she sends him, feral, unchecked by reason.

That was three days ago.

No one has eaten, no one has slept.

They stick her in a vault much like Ward’s, but sub-level doesn’t do anything to drown her out.

 

 

 

 

Skye goes down to see Ward once in these three days. He is pacing his cell. He looks crazed.

“ _What_ is happening?”

Skye realizes dimly that he thinks he’s going crazy. Hearing things. Imagining.

“Simmons was brainwashed.”

He stops moving.

“May is trying to break her out of it.”

Her chin quivers. She has been wounded, and the wound is emptying itself out as she breathes. It’s all on display on the concrete floor.

“Do you...do you know of anything that could--"

He's shaking his head. He looks so sorry. Skye believes it.

The rest of the time Skye spends in her room. She can’t run, so she’ll hide.

 

 

 

 

May follows Jemma down the rabbit hole.

It’s not a good idea for her, but someone has to pull Jemma out, remind her who she is. Anyone could do that. But no one but May has the stomach to do the hard part - to look her in the face while she suffers. To endure it alongside her.

She’s fading in and out of reality. Agent 33, when they finally extracted her, explained the process, and May does her best not to imagine how bad it must be hurting Jemma to have to relive it.

The sound is deafening. Everyone else might think she’s scared or damaged or deranged, and that’s why she can’t cease her own loud anguish.

Jemma is remembering what she has done while under their spell.

May does not leave her side for three days.

 

 

 

 

Trip had been waiting for her to return. Anticipating it. Mentally preparing for the fallout, ready to support her. He’d give her a hard time like everyone else, but with a proud smile, so she’d know he’s still on her team. He’d help her readjust, sit in a chair arms-crossed while she putters around in the lab to make sure she’s okay coming back to her former self.

He had been waiting. Ready for things to go back to normal.

On the first day, for the first time since his partner died, Trip vomits.

 

 

 

 

Coulson and Fitz sit side by side for three days, which is probably the most time either of them have spent with each other. They don’t speak very much. Rather they just watch the feeds.

The room they put Jemma in is cinderblock and poorly lit. They can see May’s chest heave, sweat pouring off of her as she paces the room. The rig that Jemma is shackled to is set up exactly to Agent 33’s specifications. They didn’t think they would have to use it so soon.

Jemma thrashes against it.

This is the most painful thing Fitz has ever experienced. Of course, Fitz often attributes higher emotional importance to all things Jemma. This is a fault of his. No matter how many times, in the days, weeks, and months from now Jemma says that she chose this, that this was a risk she ran and luck was not on her side, Fitz will feel fire on his skin when he is reminded. She left. She left for him, for herself, for them. And she came back under some other influence. She came back wounded.

He does not consider, of course, that Jemma feels the same. Felt the same. Every time she saw him struggle, every time he looked at her with the same expression in his eyes that he first let loose down underwater, down in the dark, a fire burned her, consumed and consumed. And it still does. He does not consider this, because as much as the outside world might think them to be of one mind, she is his blind spot. And he is hers.

He lets the fire burn him for three days.

 

 

 

 

Coulson feels responsible. There’s a reason he sits by Fitz’s side, and it’s to remind him, in tandem with the live feed of torture taking place between two of his agents, underneath his base, that he is responsible for all failure.

This hurts worse than he expected. It was always going to. You cannot predict the pain of seeing someone you love become a victim. They are a ragtag group of heroes, the only ones left, and they are used to swallowing their own pain. But each other’s? They might never get used to that.

He had admired Jemma’s decision, calling it courageous, despite his reservations. Now he wishes he protected her from herself. From the larger threat. From everything.

They had grown close. He had been her only lifeline, and it was his fault that she was alone. So he gave her all he had. And her sunny little apartment (that he helped pick out, thank you very much) had been a little reprieve. A glimpse of a life neither of them would ever really have again.

Coulson sits by Fitz, silent as he’s ever seen him, and takes his punishment as Jemma takes hers.

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t scream for three days. It’s not really possible. Maybe she just screams until her voice leaves her completely, until silence is the only thing left. Still, the echoes reverberate around the compound, chase thought away. Persist.

 

 

 

 

Jemma does not remember much.

Well, that’s not true. Jemma remembers things she can’t even begin to describe. Atrocities. Blankness. The safety of autopilot. The freedom when someone else makes your decisions. The burden.

She comes out of it screaming (yes, we know) and gasping and raging. She’s been wrung through a carwash, soaked too cold, Easter-colors mixing and saturating every thought and memory, then being washed away, scrubbed out of her. And back again. Spun in and out. Her chest aches from too much breathing.

May is there. Melinda May is everywhere. Part of her wishes to disobey, and the rest of her wants nothing more than to let May take over the reins. May would take good care of her mind.

That’s the frightening part, though. After a while it almost doesn’t matter who’s in charge, as long as it’s someone else but her. Leave her without a directive and she is blank. It is still true that she feels nothing for HYDRA. It is now also true that she doesn’t feel anything for anything. A haze of neutrality.

Until it isn’t. Not anymore. Waves of contempt and disgust wash over her, flood into her mouth, drown her lungs. It is viscous and black and ever-present and it smears her neatness, bites her and wakes her up. It continues for decades.

But by the end, it is just waves. Clearness. The veneer has been pummeled away completely. She is raw; she is herself. Her voice is absent, chased away in terror, and any subtle movement in her throat makes her grimace.

When May is certain, she unshackles the girl, gathers her up. Sticks her in a bath for a long while, then gathers her up again and puts her in her long-unused room, gently on the bed.

The air in here is stale. She's been gone a long while, and she had only just gotten back. Her suitcases are still in the middle of the floor where she left them when she first returned. Didn't even get a chance to unpack.

She stares at her suitcases while May shuts the door. She can see her footsteps underneath, settling in to stand guard. There is some murmuring, some assurances she imagines, and someone else's feet replace hers. Coulson. He doesn't open the door. She is grateful.

 

 

 

 

She sleeps for sixteen hours, wakes up to a steaming cup of tea.

 

 

 

 

May comes in while she’s staring at her suitcases again. “Are you ready for the receiving line?”

Jemma lies. Jemma nods.

 

 

 

 

Trip comes in first. After her, he has the most medical experience. He takes a look at her throat. He still seems to be every bit the gentle heart she left behind.

"You can't speak at all?"

She shakes her head.

“It’s gonna be a few weeks.” He reaches behind him and produces a whiteboard and a marker with a smile.

“I’m glad you’re home,” he says. She doesn’t have to write anything down. She just smiles back.

 

 

 

 

A man who she vaguely recognizes as Lance Hunter comes in next, stepping in and shutting the door quickly, like perhaps he wasn’t supposed to be in here.

She raises an eyebrow.

“Hiyah, love.” He shifts from foot to foot, seeming nervous. “So I wanted to take this opportunity, while you are mute and possibly still in a weakened state, to apologize for almost shooting you.”

She stares at him.

“On the boat? When you were talking to the Ice Man? It seems people on this team do not take kindly to near injury.”

Her expression grows amused. She picks up her whiteboard.

_May got to you first?_

“It hurt,” he pouts.

She erases, and then: _Forgiven._

He perks up. “Really?” He plops down on her bed, clearly no longer seeing an imminent threat. “You seem to be the nice one out of this bunch.”

She quirks her eyebrow again.

“Besides when you were brainwashed!” he corrects.

She gets about thirty seconds more of overly-familiar rambling before May finds him and kicks him out. Almost literally.

 

 

 

 

May stays behind. Jemma hasn’t tried to say anything to her yet, because the whiteboard isn’t going to do her feelings justice. Like the rest of them, Jemma knows very little about May’s past. But she can only imagine how difficult that must’ve been for her.

“Coulson’s in the kitchen. He asked me to tell you he’s attempting to make you a smoothie so healthy you’ll voice will be back to normal in no time. Lots of kale.”

Jemma smiles a little. But her head hurts.

“Who do you want next? Skye or Fitz?”

Before Jemma can write down an answer, Skye makes the decision for her, barging into the room.

“Skye,” May warns. “We talked about this.”

Skye ignores her, watching Jemma, who is curled up defensively against the pillows, startled. The sight of her makes Skye swallow hard.

“Are you okay?” she asks weakly.

Well, her head hurts. And she was violated, pulverized, and turned into a weapon. They put a leash on her very favorite part of herself and used it for evil. And now she’s afraid of everyone. And her bones ache. And her head hurts.

She starts to cry. The two women hold her together.

 

 

 

 

After touching her face and asking if she’s okay, Fitz talks to her for a long time. And she can’t speak to help him find his words, so he works through it on his own. The sound of his voice, even frustrated and angry and terrified, is pure comfort.

Finally, he asks: “Do you even still want to be...whatever we are? Partners?”

He is paying close attention, so he sees how much the question hurts her; the structure, perhaps rattled by what happened before, crumbles now like a strong breath against a house of cards.

She swallows hard, grimacing from the pain, and then picks up her pen.

_You’re my best friend in the world._

He hugs her close, and she finds the feeling, however fleeting, is perfect.

 

 

 

 

That night, when she tries to return to sleep, the nightmares start. May comes in to sit on the bed and hold her hand.

 

 

 

 

Not everything is fine, but it can be.

 


End file.
